What I think of as the saddest verse is probably not what you think.
There are a lot of verses about the death of Jesus that are sad. I mean, the very Son of Heaven is tortured and beaten and crucified. And he did it for love of me.
Or how about the verses about the babies Herod killed, or Jesus weeping with Mary after Lazarus’s death, or the end of Paul’s second letter to Timothy when he asks him to come quickly to be with him at what we know is the end of Paul’s life? Those are pretty sad, too. But they aren’t what I’m thinking about today.
The Saddest Verse
The verse I’m thinking of is actually at the end of Genesis 3.
The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. (v. 20)
I know, it probably doesn’t sound very sad. In fact, there’s a lot of hope here. Right after the curse is handed down, Adam names his wife. And he gives her a beautiful name: Eve. She’s going to be the mother of all living people ever. The world will continue. It’s like he was thinking, “God didn’t destroy them and start over, so I will call you Eve.”
But that is precisely the problem.
Getting Named
Up until this very moment, she had simply been called “the woman.” When Adam was naming all the animals (chapter 2), God called them whatever Adam named them. But when God brings the woman to him, Adam doesn’t give her a name. Instead, he says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (2:23)
My Bible professor in college translated Adam’s response into the vernacular for us: “WOOHOO!”
In other words, Adam was beyond thrilled. She was gorgeous, and she fit him. She was his match and his helpmeet. Simply put, she was his. And she didn’t need a name because they were a unit. When Adam thought of her, he didn’t think of her as something separate from himself. She was part of him. He was part of her. They were wholly together in every way.
And then came the temptation. The choice. The fruit. The curse.
One by one, they experienced the death of their intimacy, their innocence, their security, their trust in God and each other. Heck, at one point, Adam totally threw her under the bus (if he’d known what a bus was), blaming her for his part in the fruit-eating fiasco.
And after it all fell out around them, he looked at her, and for the first time, she was … separate. They were torn apart. They were distinct. He needed to call her something because he could no longer call her part of himself. She had to have a name.
Echoes of Sadness
They had been entirely whole, together. And now they were separate. She had been simply “the woman,” and now she had to have a name of her own. To his credit, Adan gave her a hope-filled, loving, carefully-chosen name. “Eve” was totally a great way to describe who she was going to be going forward.
But it also makes entirely too clear that she was no longer what she had been up to that point. And it indicted that there was choice but to go forward; there was no going back to what had been. (This was further evidenced by the angel with the flaming sword who guarded the entrance to the garden after they’d been sent away – Gen. 3:24. Totally no going back.)
And sadly, it still works that way.
My husband is the closest person on earth to me, but we are still separate. I’ve taken his last name, the ultimate gift on his part, but he still has to call me something. We are separate-together. We pursue unity and oneness, but we are often derailed by our selfishness as well as everyday distractions. Every marriage is like that.
The unity and oneness that the woman knew with her husband can never be experienced by two named people. Of course, if we let him, Jesus can make us more unified, more one, over the years. But we can never know the full oneness that the woman and her husband knew.
He named her. He separated himself from her. And no marriage has ever again fully experienced what they had experienced, what God had meant for marriage to.
And that is why Genesis 3:20 is the saddest verse in the Bible to me.
